Battles Foreign and Familial

The Honey Locust, Jeffrey Round’s novel about the siege of Sarajevo, is structured on a juxtaposition: it lays the disagreements and resentments that tear a family apart alongside the historical hatreds, political machinations and horrendous violence of war.

There is something familiar about this sort of set-up; it is the cloth from which several recent action movies have been cut. In Body of Lies, we see Russell Crowe depositing his children in the back of minivans, attending soccer games—all the while barking commands via satellite phone to Leonardo DiCaprio in an actual war zone in Africa. The Honey Locust tells a far more subtle and searching story, more intent on registering the ambivalences of familial and political situations in their full and often irresolvable complexity.

Round’s main character is Angela Thomas, a passionate and accomplished photojournalist who, when we pick up the story, is finalizing...